Volume 30, Number 5 · March 31, 1983
Which Side Was Rabelais On?
By D.P. Walker
The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais
by Lucien Febvre, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb
Harvard University Press, 516 pp., $35.00
The original version of this book was first published in 1942 (there were reprints in 1947 and 1962). It was primarily a polemical work directed against the interpretation of Rabelais as a militant anti-Christian atheist that had been put forward by Abel Lefranc in his introduction to Pantagruel in 1922. There is therefore some need to justify the publication of an English translation of a French book published forty years ago, and dealing mainly with French literature, that is directed against a view of Rabelais sixty years old and, one would have hoped, now completely obsolete. I think this publication can, however, be justified, for the following reasons.
Review, 1496 words
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